A history of West Chicago,
since 1873
Postcards, papers and photographs of West Chicago from public archives, woven together by decade. Neighbors fill in the gaps.
The story
from WikipediaRead it all ↗Erastus Gary, of Pomfret, Connecticut, homesteaded 760 acres (310 ha) on the banks of the DuPage River, just south of West Chicago's present day city limits in the 1830s. His son became "Judge" Elbert Henry Gary, the first CEO of America's first billion-dollar corporation, U.S. Steel, and for whom Gary, Indiana, is named. Gary also helped bring brothers Jesse and Warren Wheaton, founders of nearby Wheaton, Illinois, the DuPage County seat, from Connecticut to the Midwest. A pioneer cemetery on the old Gary Homestead, where a sawmill had been built by the Garys, just north of Gary's Mill Road, and north of its terminus at Illinois Route 59, was built over with apartment buildings in the 1960s.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Timeline
built from the dates on the items belowFinish West Chicago’s story
Most archives stop around 1920. The photos from after that are in family albums, not libraries.
3 of 10 decades since 1900 have photos 🔁Retake an old viewWest Chicago, Illinois. Reading t…, 1943: stand where they stood+15 📦Share a family photoSign in to add one+10Famous people from West Chicago
See all 7 →
West Chicago, decade by decade
1990s
Then & now
No then-and-now pairs yet. Take a photo from the same spot as West Chicago, Illinois. Reading the minutes at a meeting of the West Chicago Lodge of the International Brotherhood of … (1943) and it appears here side by side.
🔁 Retake this view · +15Stories next door
nearby towns’ historyFrom Wikimedia Commons (3) and the Library of Congress (3). Images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.